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By Keith Archibald Forbes (see About Us) exclusively for Bermuda Online
To refer to this web file, please use "bermuda-online.org/sirgeorgesomers.htm" as your Subject.
Introduction
Sir George
Somers: A man and his Times. Book by Bermudian the late David Raine.
The portrait below right was painted by Paul van Somer (no relation) originally from the Netherlands, believed to be during the lifetime of the Admiral.
The original oil painting canvas -in much greater detail than shown above - measures 45 x 35 inches, in wood and gilded 54.5 by 43.25 inch frame.
It and its twin - of wife Lady Somers - were purchased in 1932 (some say 1937) by the Bermuda Historical Monuments Trust and Bermuda Historical Society (BHS) from Miss E. Winifred Bellamy, of Woodside Cottage, Plymouth, Devon, England, a descendant of Sir George. Both paintings had been handed down from generation to generation in England through a collateral branch of the Somers family.
Also in the Museum of the BHS at Par la Ville, 13 Queen Street, Hamilton is the wooden sea chest belonging to Sir George. It is of early 17th century Italian origin. The chest is thought to be Venetian and has a scene from Greek mythology showing Artemis, Goddess of the Hunt, surprised by Acteon, a hunter, while bathing. To punish him she turns him into a stag, whereupon his own dogs attack and kill him, no longer recognizing him as their master.
The Bellamy family, direct descendants of the Admiral, also sold Sir George's lode stone. This was used to magnetize his compass needles during his earlier seafaring voyages. The lode stone is thought to date back to 1600. Egg-shaped and banded by strips of iron, it is mounted on an oak plinth with a plaque which states 'Lodestone, Sir George Summer, obit 1610'. Also on display at the BHS Museum is a freehand sketch of the 1609 Somer's Map, a hand-painted reproduction of the original map of Bermuda charted by Sir George. The original map is in the Bermuda Archives.
The existence of these valuable artifacts was first made known to Bermudians by Major-General and two times Governor of Bermuda and historian Sir John Henry Lefroy. In the 1882 edition of the manuscript in the Sloane Collection, British Museum he edited, he added an original and unpublished portrait of Admiral Sir George Somers which Miss Bellamy inherited from her ancestor, Dr. Bellamy, MD, connected with the Somers family. Lefroy reproduced the painting on page 11 of his book "Historye of the Bermudaes or Summer Islands."
Lefroy was also the author of "Memorials Of the Discovery and Early Settlement of the Bermudas or Somers Islands." It was first published in MDCCCLXXXII by the Hakluyt Society in a limited edition. No. LXV is today in the collection of the Bermuda Historical Society. On pages 49 to 52, the lives of Sir George and Lady Somers are described by historian Preston Davie in the book Virginia Historical Portraiture, 556 pages. It was first published in 1929 in a Limited Edition of One Thousand Copies, of which the Bermuda Historical Society has Copy No. 369.
Englishman
Admiral Sir George
Somers, was born in Lyme Regis, Dorset,
England, in 1554, the son of John Somers. Berne Farm, between the Marshwood Vale
village of Whitchurch Canonicorum and the main road at Charmouth, was the Somers
family home. He died in 1610 in Bermuda, with his heart
buried here. He first gained fame in an expedition in
1595 against the Spanish Main led by Sir Amyas Preston. In 1600, he commanded HMS Vanguard
which stopped and captured a Spanish treasure ship. In 1601, he captained HMS Swiftsure during
the attack of the Spanish fleet off Kinsale. In 1602, he commanded HMS Warspite to the
Azores. He was a friend of Sir Walter Raleigh (but did not upset Queen Elizabeth 1 like
the latter).
He was knighted in 1603 by King James I of England and VI of Scotland. Earlier the Mayor of Lyme Regis, he was Member of Parliament for his town and district of Lyme Regis from 1603.
In 1604, the poet T. Winter wrote a poet's praise to Sir George, in lavish summary of his life to that time. In 1606, he was a principal catalyst in the formation of the Virginia Company.
In 1609 he was made Admiral of the Virginia Company's nine vessel Third Supply Relief Fleet that sailed from London, then Plymouth, bound for Virginia in 1609, to reprovision and bring fresh colonists to that first ever English Colony in the New World.
It was at that time the largest, most expensive and most ambitious colonial expedition by any nation, financed privately by London based merchants and noblemen united in a common cause for profit for themselves and their nation.
They intended to colonize the New World for Britain in competition with Spain, France and the Netherlands. They wanted to give Britons a fresh start in virgin lands, to relieve overcrowding in Britain's cities; and to be seen as the men who engineered such initiatives. This was the general way colonization was handled then.
Postage stamps of 1984 show Departure from Plymouth in 1609 and Admiral Sir George Somers (right), with fellow Bermuda castaway Sir Thomas Gates.
| For many days, all went well. The Sea
Venture was newly built from an English shipyard. But the
weather started to go bad. On 25 July 1609 the Sea Venture was
caught in a fierce tempest (an early hurricane by the standards of today) off the Azores,
and carried for several days by raging winds. They took her hundreds of miles from her
scheduled course. All the passengers were sea sick and miserable. Then she was wrecked off
the reefs of Bermuda's Discovery Bay, with no loss of life.
Sir George was the first man to explore and map Bermuda. Then, Bermuda was known as Virgineola - a smaller edition of Virginia, the British colony founded a few years earlier - in tribute to the late Virgin Queen, Elizabeth. |
 |
| But with
King James the First of England and Sixth of Scotland, son of the former Scottish Queen
whom Elizabeth had imprisoned and executed, a more diplomatic name was necessary. For
leadership, courage at sea and other skills Admiral Sir George Somers showed, the islands
became the Somers Isles, still Bermuda's official alternate name.
In his book "America," Alistair Cooke wrote that there were only three survivors, found in 1612. Instead of being the only survivors, they volunteered to be left behind in Bermuda while nearly 150 more survivors went on to Jamestown in 1610. |
 |
In
the meantime, seven
of the nine vessels of the Third Supply Relief Fleet eventually reached Virginia in August
1609. The others were the Diamond, Blessing, Falcon, Unitie, Lion and Swallow.
They were all battered by the same tempest and forced to jettison much needed cargo. The Catch was the only one to perish at sea, with the loss of all souls.
Admiral Sir George Somers, Governor Elect Sir Thomas Gates and their companions including John Rolfe, all presumed dead by those in Virginia, remained in Bermuda for 10 months.
Their first Christmas was much warmer than in England or Virginia. William Strachey, their scribe, kept a diary and also recorded how the colonists built the first St. Peter's Church in St. George's from palmetto and cedar and thatched it with palmetto; and attached the bell of the wrecked Sea Venture.
Sir George supervised the building of the 30 ton pinnace Patience while the 80 ton barque Deliverance was done by Sir Thomas Gates, both from spars and rigging of the wrecked "Sea Venture" and local cedar. Sir George commanded the two vessels when they sailed to Virginia in May 1610, with 142 castaways, after 42 weeks in Bermuda. On arrival in Jamestown 10 days later, they found the colonists in great distress, with only 60 survivors. Fortunately, Sir George had provisioned his ships with enough food to buy a little time for the Jamestown Colony of Virginia.
Arrival of Sir George and colonists in Jamestown in 1610. Also from a Bermuda postage stamp.
Virginia suffered from famine, disease, periodic attacks from hostile
native Indians inability of colonists - many of them from English cities - to adapt to new
rural conditions.
Their food ran out.
They had decided to abandon their colony.
Without the large stock of fresh foods and animals brought by Sir George and his companions from the Somers Isles, Virginia would have been wiped out.
The arrival of the Deliverance and Patience in 1610 was Virginia's first Thanksgiving (before the New England version).
It was because of the arrival of Sir George, Sir Thomas Gates, Captain Christopher Newport and almost all colonists and crew originally on the Sea Venture feared lost in the tempest - and the food they brought.
Food on the two Bermuda built ships included wild hogs found on Bermuda.
They had been left there by much earlier sailors before they sailed away again - or put overboard nearby by passing ships, to swim ashore, breed and become a ready supply of food in case of emergency.
They were the first pigs found in the New World by English speaking colonists.
They reached America from Bermuda.
Their importance in Bermuda was such that a rendering of one of them was featured later on Bermuda's Hog Money, the earliest Colonial coinage in the English speaking New World.
Bermuda Hogs 1609 - painted in 1901 by Winslow Homer
And the humble potato, intended for planting in
Virginia and carried on the Sea Venture was first grown in the New World in Bermuda.
It was grown there by the castaways before they brought it to Virginia.
Also taken were the first onions, figs and olives, from stock grown first in Bermuda.
From Virginia, they spread to Maryland and elsewhere.
In fact, many more of the plants of Virginia and other early American colonies of England got there initially via Bermuda.
In those days, Bermuda had a considerable colonial importance.
First St. Peter's Church in Bermuda
The safe arrival in Jamestown, after deliverance from the tempest which
had wrecked the Sea Venture and caused the long stay in Bermuda of its passengers and
crew, were the chief elements of the saga that inspired William Shakespeare - when the
news sent by William Stachey and others reached London - that he wrote The Tempest.
(Unfortunately for Virginia and Bermuda, he used poetic license place the work on an Italian island, instead of retaining geographical and historical accuracy).
But even with the arrival of the Deliverance and Patience at Jamestown with food supplies, better conditions for the colonists of Jamestown did not last for long. Food became in such short supply that a decision was taken to abandon the colony.
Fortunately for the departing colonists then exiting via the James River, they met incoming Lord de la Ware with three ships sufficiently well supplied for a month to relieve their distress and salvage the colony. Lord De La Ware expected to find the Colony in good condition - not still in need of food.
Sir George volunteered to return to Bermuda in the Patience, to collect more food, knowing that Bermuda had plenty of wild hogs, fowl, fish and other marine creatures. The small 30 ton vessel reached Bermuda safely but Sir George became ill and on November 9, 1610 died (from eating too much pork) in Bermuda. His nephew Matthew, who had accompanied him with a small crew, did not fulfill his uncle's wishes to return to Virginia. Instead, he carried Sir George's preserved body (less his heart, which had been cut out and buried in Bermuda, in strict accordance with his wishes) on board the Patience, pickled in a barrel, back to Lyme Regis in Dorset, where the Admiral was buried in 1611 at Whitchurch Canonicorum in Dorset.
The Virginians never got the additional food promised them from Bermuda, but England got its first Bermuda built sea-going vessel, the sight of which aroused much curiosity in Lyme Regis when it arrived because of its construction so different to most English built ships. Her use of New World Bermuda cedar and the fact that the sailors aboard her duly reported how she was constructed in part from spars and rigging of the original wrecked "Sea Venture" - such a prominent ship in the Lyme Regis area from Sir George Somer's acquisition of her - made the "Patience" famous in Dorset and beyond. She never sailed back to the New World but continued in British coastal waters.
When Governor Butler found the neglected place where the heart and entrails had been buried in St. George's in 1610, he composed his own flowery tribute of his era which was engraved in marble. It is no longer extant but a record of it has been made.
This famous Governor and great compiler of the earliest historical records of Bermuda, made sure a memorial tablet was erected in the Somers Garden, St. George's, with the following inscription:
"Near this spot was interred in the year 1610 the heart of the heroic Admiral Sir George Somers who nobly sacrificed his life to carry succor to the infant and suffering Plantation now the State of Virginia. To preserve his fame to future ages, near the scene of his memorable shipwreck of 1609, the Governor and Commander in Chief of the Colony for the time being caused this tablet to be erected, 1876."
Erected by public subscription in 1908 and still there today, it shows how the Admiral was a
On February 15, the Memorial Monument to Sir George Somers was unveiled in St. George's, with the 1st Battalion of the Bedfordshire Regiment in attendance. This is in Somers Garden today, near the site where Butler's Memorial once stood.
This was erected on June 2, 1959, in Plymouth, Devon, England. It was where the Admiral first started his Bermuda Adventure in 1609. It is not far from the Mayflower Plaque where the Pilgrims sailed to what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620.
Last Updated:
January 4, 2009
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